Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Intel announced a new Atom processor aimed at embedded devices and in-car infotainment platforms. The "Tunnel Creek" CPU offers an onboard graphics controller, memory controller, and audio, linking to a separate I/O controller via a standard PCI Express interface, according to the company.

A pair of vendors that offer proprietary solutions based on the open source memcached project are updating their products this week. While both Gear6 and Schooner are adding their own proprietary bits to enhance their respective memcached-based offerings, both vendors are also ensuring that they also are contributing back to the open source core.

Well, actually, no they won't. I'm talking about purchasing and installing a brand new Linux cluster in a pure Windows shop and having any expectations that it will be used. Your co-workers will probably look at you funny, and they might stand way over on the other side of the elevator during that ride up to the fourth floor, but don't count on them knocking your door down begging for access to your shiny new Linux resource.

Oracle presented a beta of what it called a "much faster" MySQL at the O'Reilly MySQL Conference and insists it will be continuing to invest in the open source database. Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, Edward Screven, presented the beta version of MySQL 5.5 which will now use InnoDB as its default storage engine, saying that the switch offers a 200% performance improvement and over ten times faster recovery times. He assured the audience that despite the switch to Oracle's InnoDB, Oracle will be maintaining the pluggable storage engine architecture and that the company would continue to ship the same code base in the community and enterprise editions.

Does using a lightweight Linux desktop always mean trading lower resource usage for usability and features? Juliet Kemp reviews LXDE, one of the newest lightweight Linux desktops.

The Fedora project released a beta version of Fedora 13 (codenamed "Goddard"). The updated community Linux distribution is touted for features including automatic print-driver installation, the Btrfs filesystem, enhanced 3D driver support, revamped Python bindings, and the Zarafa groupware package, says the project.

Submissions for the Plasma Javascript Jam Session closed at the end of March and the judging commenced, with the community joining the judging panel as a collective "5th member". Every Plasmoid that was submitted was a success and a joy to try out: congratulations to all of those who participated. It was a competition with prizes up for grabs, however, so we had to make the required tough calls and declare some winners. Without further ado, here are your 2010 Javascript Jam Session competition crown bearers!

Despite the fact that version 2.1 of Google's mobile operating system has been available for several months, most devices are still running older versions. According to a device dashboard by Android developer Raphaël Moll, over the last 14 days only 27% of Android smartphones accessing the Android Market were running version 2.1. The majority – 38% and 32% respectively – were running versions 1.5 and 1.6. Version 2.0.1 accounts for just under 3% of users accessing the site and versions 1.1 and 2.0 barely troubled the scorers, presumably because updates are available for popular devices supplied with these versions.

Learn how to choose and configure a boot manager for your Linux system. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn for fun.

When Google announced a deal to acquire video technology company On2 last year, the move generated speculation that the search giant was aiming to liberate the VP8 codec in order to accelerate the advancement of standards-based open video. Google has remained silent about its plans for On2's intellectual property, but signs have emerged that the company is planning to do precisely what the speculators anticipated.

If you’re a Linux user, you’ve likely been asked at some point if you want Ext3, Ext4, XFS, ReiserFS, Btrfs, or one of many other filesystem acronyms. This choice confuses new and old users alike, and like all software, the options change as technology improves. Many people probably don’t care what filesystem they use as long as it’s stable and reasonably fast, but how do you know which one that is? This guide will attempt to cover the basic differences between the most common options, and provide the pros and cons of each choice.

I’m certain, given the things that have, or in some cases, have not, happened since the completion of the sale of Sun to Oracle, that many would have wished that IBM had purchased the flailing company. Those seeing the commitment of IBM to many open source projects would tend to believe that the progress of the many Sun projects would be better served under the aegis of IBM. As it is, many are wondering what is going to happen to the many Sun projects, with the Java stream being probably the only thing not in some cloud of possible excision from living efforts.

Microsoft has been busy these past few days reminding the world that it really is an organization of monstrous proportions and its tendrils reach from the humblest consumer desktop right up to the level of super-computing. Its message is clear: The company has no intention of giving up any of the markets in which it competes to open source operating systems like Linux -- at least not without the mother of all fights.

Google will take a swashbuckling step towards license-free web video playback next month when it open sources the leading video codec from a company it just acquired for $124.6 million, according to a report citing multiple people familiar with the matter. NewTeeVee reports that Mountain View will open source On2's VP8 codec at its Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco in mid-May. The publication also says that Google will roll the codec into its Chrome browser, and that Mozilla will do the same with Firefox.

Originally, PDF export in OpenOffice.org was limited to three levels of quality, whose exact differences were obscure to most users. But that was many releases ago. The latest versions of OpenOffice.org provide, for no cost, most of the features available in Acrobat Standard for $299 -- to say nothing of a few features that even Acrobat Pro Extended does not include even at $699. The problem for many people is knowing what options they might want, especially since the wording of the dialog window is sloppy in a couple of places.

Expected for release in May, Linux kernel version 2.6.34 contains several new network drivers and various advancements designed to improve network performance or increase network configuration flexibility, which will particularly impact virtualisation.

What happened to the old "sysadmin" of just a few years ago? We've split what used to be the sysadmin into application teams, server teams, storage teams, and network teams. Now look at what we've done -- knowledge is so decentralized we must invent new roles to act as liaisons between all the IT groups.

One thing I have noticed on just about all windows installed computers outside of my strict control is that they are full of viruses, spyware and there are more programs installed than they know what to do with. These programs are also not updated with the latest service patches and virus lists. Most of the time the programs are junkware that are installed automatically with other programs and automatically start up when they log in. Consequently their machines are a mess and run slower than I can swim through frozen molasses. It is easy to see why virus and malware writers love windows machines.

Besides the Fedora 13 Graphics Testing Week taking place over the next few days, this week is also significant within the Fedora community as it will mark the release of Fedora 13 Beta. There's just one month left to go until Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) will be officially released, but over the past few hours we have been testing out what will become the official Fedora 13 Beta spin this morning. Fedora 13 is quite exciting and worth checking out.

fter covering the war of words over IBM's use of patents in a business dispute with French start-up TurboHercules and giving my two cents on this open-source family fight, I'd hope the matter would die down. I was wrong. Florien Mueller, the founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign, who started this most recent open-source internal fuss, has now published an analysis which claims that some of the patents "IBM asserted against Hercules may also [jeopardize] other major Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, including but not limited to OpenBSD, Xen, VirtualBox, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Kaffe."